The s was arguably the single decade of the 20th century when recorded music was most central to culture. As the used vinyl bins of the world are still telling us, records were the thing. Labels were flush with cash, sales of LPs and singles were brisk, and record stores were everywhere. Home stereos were a standard part of middle-class culture. Analog recording technology was at its zenith, FM radio was ascendant, and the AM dial still focused on music.
The children of the baby boom were coming into their late twenties and thirties—young enough to still be serious music consumers, but old enough to have their own generation of children who were starting to buy music. And then there was the music itself. Disco, an entire cultural movement fueled by a genre of music—with massive impact on fashion, film, TV and advertising—was utterly ubiquitous. Soul and funk were reaching new levels of artistry.
Punk, the first serious backlash against the rock mainstream, came into its own. Records from Jamaica were making their way to the UK and, eventually, the U. As culture moved in every direction at once, there were more great songs than anyone could count. As voted by our full time staff and contributors, these are Pitchfork's best songs of the s. Listen to the best songs of the s on Apple Music and Spotify.
Broken English , her first rock record in 12 years, was the comeback triumph no one expected, not least in how gritty it was. The chilling title track is a prophetic merging of punk and dance, with lyrics that plumb the depths of her losses.
It manages this even as the lyric itself is private—the literal text of a classified ad. Jennings and his peers were traditionalists who bucked the very notion of tradition. All of them had been manhandled by the industry, but few bristled against the mainstream quite as strongly as Jennings, who found himself on a series of poorly planned tours that left him deep in debt to his label and addicted to amphetamines. But the version recorded for his massive crossover album Africa Brasil exudes joy, sparks flying from every exuberant note.
